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Senate Panel Endorses Sotomayor

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, moved closer to taking her seat on Tuesday as the Senate Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly approved her nomination and sent it on to the full Senate.

But the contentious public hearings this month and Tuesday’s largely partisan committee vote demonstrated that judicial confirmations remain a hotly contested political and ideological battleground with implications for Mr. Obama’s future choices for the courts.

The committee’s vote was 13 to 6, with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican joining the panel’s 12 Democrats in voting for the nomination. The action cleared the way for a Senate floor vote next week for Judge Sotomayor, who would be the 111th justice to serve on the Supreme Court, the first Hispanic and the third woman.

She is widely expected to win confirmation, as Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate and five Republicans, including Mr. Graham, have said they would vote for her.

But Senate Republicans have used the Sotomayor nomination to signal that they are determined to deny Mr. Obama an easy path as he sets about filling dozens of seats on the federal appeals courts and possibly additional vacancies on the Supreme Court.

In coming weeks, Mr. Obama will announce several nominees to appeals courts, which could change the ideological balance on some of them. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, for example, has long been regarded as the nation’s most conservative and was the Bush administration’s choice in bringing national security cases. But Mr. Obama has already nominated one judge to the 15-member court and has four additional vacancies to fill.

That could, in the hopes of liberals, transform the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, into a reliably liberal bench, a prospect likely to rally conservative opposition in the Senate. If the Sotomayor nomination is any guide, Mr. Obama’s chances of winning broad bipartisan support for his choices are slim.

Photo

Of the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, only Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voted in favor of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.Credit
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Among the Republicans who voted against Judge Sotomayor were two who came from states with large Hispanic voting populations. Another two, Senators Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, are committee veterans who had never voted against a nominee selected by a Democratic president.

In her four days before the committee this month, Judge Sotomayor followed the modern script for Supreme Court nominees by trying to take the edges off any issues that could be read against her. She declined to engage the committee members over most of the difficult legal issues of the day, including property rights and the reach of the Second Amendment, and even repudiated Mr. Obama’s assertions that a good judge should have some “empathy” with parties that appear before the court.

She said a judge’s job “is not to make law” but “to apply the law.” She thoroughly disowned her most controversial speeches, in which she had said that she hoped “a wise Latina” would be able to use her experience to issue better rulings than a white male judge. It was, she said, “a rhetorical flourish that fell flat.”

Nonetheless, Republicans on the committee, save Mr. Graham, lined up to denounce her remarks and openly express skepticism about what kind of justice she would be.

They all paid homage to her rich personal story as a woman who grew up in a housing project in the Bronx before going on to Princeton University and Yale Law School and then to posts on the federal bench.

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said he was “proud” that Mr. Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor, whom he described as “a very fine woman” with whom he greatly enjoyed talking. But he then went on to suggest that she was deceptive in her answers to the committee. He said that when she was asked to defend her comments about the uses of international law and her views on some members of the Supreme Court, she tried to “walk away from that, saying she didn’t say that, and it’s flat just not accurate.”

Mr. Graham said he understood why his Republican colleagues were voting against her nomination. But he said he judged her to be highly qualified, and he noted that Mr. Obama had won the presidential election and with it, the right to choose his own nominees.

Mr. Graham said he now understood what three Democratic committee members — Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — had gone through when they broke party ranks in 2005 and voted to confirm President George W. Bush’s choice of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice.

Andrea Fuller contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Senate Panel Endorses Sotomayor on a Partisan Vote. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe